A Look at the 2025 Turner Prize Show—and the Artists Vying for the U.K.’s Top Art Award

An annual celebration of the very best in British contemporary art, the Turner Prize 2025 returns this week with an exhibition of all four nominated artists in the northern English city of Bradford, Yorkshire. Though the showcases by Nnena Kalu, Mohammed Sami, Rene Matić, and Zadie Xa are not united by any particular theme, they each pull us into the artist’s own world while providing an environment for expansive, open-ended contemplation.

The four-part show opens at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery on September 27 through February 22, 2026. A new Turner Prize winner will be announced on December 9 during an award ceremony at nearby Bradford Grammar School. First prize is £25,000 ($34,000), with a further £10,000 ($13,500) awarded to each runner-up. Last year, the top honor went to Scottish artist Jasleen Kaur.

Founded in 1984, the Turner Prize promotes debate about the current state of art in the U.K. and has been no stranger to controversy, particularly in the raucous era of the YBAs, when the award spotlighted hotshots like Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, and Chris Ofili. Decades later, the award continues to recognize important achievements by artists either born or working in Britain. Here are this year’s shortlisted nominees.

Nnena Kalu

The standout artist this year is the Glasgow-born, London-based artist Nnena Kalu, who invites audiences to walk among her hanging bundles of found material—including tape, VHS tape, rope, paper, and fabric—that have been bound, layered, and knotted into place by a series of rhythmic motions. The pieces debuted last year at Manifesta 15 in Barcelona and, here, are exhibited alongside Kalu’s drawings; charged, swirling vortexes, one of which was recently included in the group show “Conversations” at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. The artist has used many of the same works to create a fresh, site-specific installation for Cartwright Hall.

Kalu, born in 1966, is the first learning-disabled artist to be nominated for the Turner Prize. Since 1999, she has developed her practice out of studios run by the charity ActionSpace, which quickly recognized the scale of her ambition. Kalu has been publicly exhibiting her work since 2016 and her first solo international museum exhibition, “Creations of Care,” closed last month at Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway. In 2024, she received her first commercial gallery show at Arcadia Missa in London.

Mohammed Sami

The somewhat elusive Mohammed Sami has long been admired by those in-the-know for his paintings of landscapes or domestic settings that capture mesmerizing surface effects but are also filled with haunting, oblique references to violence. Most of these compositions refer in some way to the artist’s memories of the Iraq War, as in the case of an abandoned table overlooked by the shadow of a CCTV camera, as well as his eventual immigration to Sweden as a refugee in 2007. This is certainly the case for the pieces on view at Cartwright Hall, which include new works alongside canvases from his nominated solo exhibition, “After the Storm,” at Blenheim Palace.

Born in 1984, Sami’s major solo institutional debut was at Camden Art Centre in London in 2023 and, earlier this year, he was the subject of a show at KM21 in The Hague, the Netherlands. He has appeared in recent group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pinault Collection in Paris, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Among the critics, Sami is most widely tipped to scoop this year’s Turner Prize.

Rene Matić

Rene Matić’s practice tends to center the photograph within a larger multimedia installation that includes sculpture, sound, text, and moving image elements, and their presentation at Cartwright Hall is no different. Based on their nominated show “As Opposed to the Truth,” at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Berlin, it foregrounds documentation of the artist’s own queer milieu against echoes of wider societal and systemic violence, in particular the rise of the far-right. The result is an uplifting celebration of resilience and defiance.

A centerpiece of the show is (2022–), a collection of abandoned black dolls, which Matić has rescued from thrift stores and tenderly rehomes and repairs. They connect this act to their father’s experience of neglect growing up as a Black child in the English city of Peterborough. Born in 1997, the artist has shown at several prominent U.K. centers for contemporary art, including Studio Voltaire, South London Gallery, and Bold Tendencies, and has been collected by Tate, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Martin Parr Foundation.

Zadie Xa

Korean-Canadian artist Zadie Xa lives and works in London, and is nominated for her enchanting, immersive exhibition “Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything” from Sharjah Biennial 16. The immediately spectacular nature of the work, with its kaleidoscopic color scheme and nature-inspired soundscape, pulls the viewer in, introducing them to its more complex, spiritual meanings. Inspired by Korean shamanism, the work refers to various ancient rituals and evokes a folkloric connection to the oceans, most particularly in a dazzling golden arrangement of hanging seashells.

Xa, born in 1983, has had recent solo museum show at Space K Seoul, Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Leeds Art Gallery. She has also been included in recent group exhibitions at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and Copenhagen Contemporary.

“A beacon of the most exciting contemporary art being made at this moment, the Turner Prize continues to delight and provoke debate as it enters its fifth decade,” said Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and chair of the Turner Prize 2025 jury.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com